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Modifying Your Course Plan and Syllabus
Modifying Your Course Plan and Syllabus
Early Steps
Early Steps
Depending on when during a semester your remote teaching begins, determine how much you must revise:
If you are compelled to teach online late in the semester, perhaps you can simply shift classroom activity to Zoom, asynchronous discussion, recorded lectures, or social annotation. One or two weeks of emergency remote teaching may not require radical changes to your syllabus and course design.
If in early- or mid-semester you anticipate only a week or two of remote teaching, it may be tempting to follow the above advice for an end-of-semester shift. But it is challenging to predict how long you will be out of the classroom so you should anticipate teaching online for longer.
As soon as possible communicate with your department or program your circumstances, and get instructions or plans to collaborate. Are you going remote on your own? What are colleagues doing? Can you get or share ideas with them? Work together?
Before you must teach online, be sure you have a PC or laptop and a reliable internet connection available. You may also need a microphone and speakers.
Designate a colleague who can take over your course in case you are temporarily unable to teach, due to conditions related to the emergency. You can enroll that colleague in your D2L course space.
From the beginning of the situation be accommodating or flexible on deadlines, and perhaps attendance in class. Like you, students have other challenges in their lives such as caring for family, utility breakdowns, or other emergency-related circumstances. They are adapting to change in many other classes, too.
Prepare to use D2L for various operations, rather than email or third-party tools. Trying to teach via email (and email attachments) will quickly get unmanageable. Students are already familiar with D2L.
Consider an asynchronous format. It may be tempting to simply move your face-to-face class into a live web-conference format, but for for prolonged periods it may be inadequate. Depending on the emergency, you and your students may have new circumstances that make synchronous meetings especially burdensome. Zoom requires fast internet, which may become less reliable.
Keep things simple. For example: produce recorded videos that are candid, and with minimal editing, rather than big-budget, time-consuming productions. Hypothes.is or D2L discussions are simple and ready-at-hand, rather than adopting social media or third-party applications.
Most likely, D2L will be the core of your emergency online plan. A few minutes learning how to upload or create things here is best for efficiently managing a class.
Communicate
Communicate
Communicate with students at least twice in the process of changing your course:
The ASAP Announcement: in an email, in D2L, or in a classroom, tell your students that changes are coming, even if you don't have the details yet. Let them know how you will next communicate to them a plan and details. This can preempt a lot of similar emails from students seeking guidance, and buys you time to retool the course as needed. You can also give them a quick instruction. For example, if you are going remote during the semester, you might say "Meantime, keep reading the assigned readings for this week."
The Tentative Syllabus: If you must shift to remote teaching and learning just before the beginning of the semester, you are then faced with having to modify a course you probably have mostly prepared for face-to-face. Either as part of the ASAP announcement, or as a separate document, you can issue a tentative syllabus that includes an overall scaffold for the course, providing what students can reasonably expect. But it need not be as detailed as a standard syllabus, since students can reasonably expect that some details need to be worked out after such a sudden change.
The Modified Syllabus. If switch to remote teaching during a semester, you can issue a modified syllabus. Once you've at least roughed in a course plan change, edit your syllabus or create an addendum document that spells out to students what they need to do during the next several days or weeks. You may make further changes as necessary later, but the Modified Syllabus document sets the course on a new path so students can continue working and learning. You can announce subsequent modifications to students with suitable advanced notice, but try, in a single document, to get the big modifications made so students can more easily manage the changes on their end. While you wish to preserve the learning goals and rigor of your course, try to keep your modifications simple and if possible, repetitive. This is good advice for any course planning.
Further communication? Barring necessary change, stick to the few, reliable communication paths you identified in your Modified Syllabus document. Frequent, but not too frequent communication is great. Students should sense that you take the modified course and their learning seriously, but try to collect updates into digest emails or D2L news items that are concise (brief). Peppering their inbox with hourly updates might get your emails lost amidst all the other email they are receiving.
Planning Process
Planning Process
Consider the following in the planning process:
What are the few communication modes you will use to communicate with your class? Email seems obvious, but within D2L you can also quickly record weekly videos where you simply update your students, and provide a more personal presence in the online course space.
What is no longer feasible, due to the suspension of face-to-face classes?
What is still doable, and can proceed as originally planned, or with some modification? (Ex. extended deadlines, a switch to electronic submission instead of paper, or vice-versa.)
What learning objectives, related content, and activities may need to be replaced? Choose your priorities, and acknowledge what you can probably remove from the course plan.
What can be added to the course that can take the place of lost activities, or even content? (If your classroom isn't available anymore, here's where the lists below become important.)
Try to build some flexibility and simplicity into the modified course plan, to reduce the pressure on you to execute it successfully.
If you elect to do video, such as webcam recording, web meeting, or screencasting, laptop microphones, speakers, and webcams can work. But you should consider purchasing an inexpensive headset, for better sound quality in both directions.
The Modified Syllabus document should include:
What is exactly is changing, and what student responsibilities are. Also, make clear what students are no longer required to do, at least temporarily. (For a start this may be telling them "Don't come to campus for class!")
What is not changing. This can simply be "for items not specifically mentioned here, consult the syllabus as originally posted," although you may wish to emphasize a few specifics.
Additional resources required. Students are responsible for learning how to use D2L features, even if you haven't used them before in your class. Students are usually pretty strong in Google-based tools. But they may need time to learn to use other tools if they are complicated. Encourage - incentivize! - students to help each other.
A few simple, reliable communications methods. This may be pre-scheduled classroom time, email, but it could also be the D2L News Feed, (which can encourage students to log into your class more frequently) or the D2L Activity Feed (which can be used to create Dropboxes and provide an FAQ for those dropboxes). That way, they know where to pay attention.
If you are recording screencasts, a microphone and headset is essential. These are useful to have around for various purposes. For public health reasons, purchase one instead of borrowing it.
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